Writing Style in Stephen King's Misery

I have to admit that I immediately fell in love with Misery the first time I read it a few years ago.  I thought the idea of a writer being captured by his number one fan was a brilliant concept to work off of, and I wasn’t disappointed with the outcome of the ending.  King was never one to sugar coat anything, I think that he did an admirable job when it came to incorporating the uncanny, the essence of gore, and naturally a sense of horrific suspense.   A while there remains a thought to discuss about this story… I wanted to focus on the linguistics and style that he used when telling the story.

I personally am a big fan of anything that strikes me as unordinary, and I love when people break the mold by doing something different.  From the first page of Misery, we are thrown into a writing style that uses punctuation sparingly, incorporates italics when felt necessary, and carries sentence structure on like a continuing realm unconscious thought.  This tactic brings the reader into the world that Paul Sheldon is living in, even though the reader doesn’t know what they are getting into quite yet.  Now while I’m sure Stephen King isn’t the only person to have done this technique… I still admire him for his willingness to not follow the crowd in his writing.

As one continues throughout the novel, he/she will realize that King’s writing style is mimicking the sanity of Paul at that certain time. King makes us hear what Sheldon is hearing, makes us see Annie Wilkes in a new light, and allows us to follow Paul’s thoughts in whatever direction they choose to take us.  For instance, if he is talking about one subject, which in turn reminds him of something else, King will stop in the middle of a paragraph, indent a completely new one, and continue the thought in italics or something.  It’s really quite interesting to get inside the mind of a protagonist and see what he is feeling at all times.

The other part of his writing that I did wanted to talk about, was his choice to include the actual manuscript of Misery’s Return within the book.  I wasn’t sure if I liked this tactic at first, and I think it took me a second read to appreciate what it really does for the story line.  For instance, this time around, I really felt like I was in the story…sometimes as Sheldon himself.  Since I was in his head so much (it seemed) I just felt natural that I should see and be a part of everything that was happening…including him writing the manuscript.  I also think that it helped to enforce the plot, while showing the reader Paul’s sanity and the trials and tribulations he was going through.  For example, in the beginning we see a clean cut copy of the book-to-be, with the absence of the letter N.  Now at first, it’s almost like ok….no big deal.  Just fill them in.  But then as the conflict gets worse, and the conditions of living become more gruesome, the letters T and E decided to stop working.  It’s like Paul has all the forces of the world forbidding him from finishing the manuscript, and from getting out of this situation alive.  Then, one also has to consider the ending, when Paul is forced to write longhand.  As writers, we all know how difficult writing longhand is, and frankly, I couldn’t imagine even writing a short story that way let alone a novel.  To think that after all Paul had been through, with his amputations, his mental status, his impending doom, etc. he has to force himself to find the will to finish the novel.  At this point, his writing is almost unreadable, and in a sense scatterbrained.  The longhand was what sold me on the technique.  I think King included it because it added the element of TIME to the story.  Paul was on a timeline, and finishing the book to him was like a race against the clock just as much as it was against Annie Wilkes herself.